divendres, 30 de juliol de 2010

Oh the night that Paddy Murphy died, is a night I'll never forgetSome of the boys got loaded drunk, and they ain't got sober yet;As long as a bottle was passed around every man was feelin' gayO'Leary came with the bagpipes, some music for to play

Chorus:That's how they showed their respect for Paddy MurphyThat's how they showed their honour and their pride;They said it was a sin and shame and they winked at one anotherAnd every drink in the place was full the night Pat Murphy died

As Mrs. Murphy sat in the corner pouring out her griefKelly and his gang came tearing down the streetThey went into an empty room and a bottle of whiskey stoleThey put the bottle with the corpse to keep that whiskey cold

Chorus

About two o'clock in the morning after empty'ing the jugDoyle rolls up the ice box lid to see poor Paddy's mugWe stopped the clock so Mrs. Murphy couldn't tell the timeAnd at a quarter after two we argued it was nine

Chorus

They stopped the hearse on George Street outside Sundance SaloonThey all went in at half past eight and staggered out at noonThey went up to the graveyard, so holy and sublimeFound out when they got there, they'd left the corpse behind!

Chorus

Oh the night that Paddy Murphy died, is a night I'll never forgetSome of the boys got loaded drunk and they ain't been sober yet;As long as a bottle was passed around every man was feelin' gayO'Leary came with the bagpipes, some music for to play

What motivates WikiLeaks to post classified material is barely even interesting. The germane question is whether the U.S. and its allies are best served by secrecy or debate. The answer is obvious.

Predictably, this week's release of thousands of classified documents by WikiLeaks — which also provided them to the New York Times, Germany's Der Spiegel and the Guardian in London — has fired up those who believe secrecy fosters national security and who shudder at the idea of journalists rummaging through classified material. Typical was the comment from tiresome Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). WikiLeaks, he maintained, is armed with "an ideological agenda implacably hostile to our military and the most basic requirements of our national security."

To which one is tempted to say: So what?

What motivates WikiLeaks to post classified material is barely even interesting, much less important. Rather, the germane question is whether the United States and its allies are best served by secrecy or debate. And the answer is obvious: No democracy can or should fight a war without the consent of its people, and that consent is only meaningful if it is predicated on real information.

That is not to say classified material should be published in haste or with indifference. Thankfully, WikiLeaks and its media colleagues appear to have behaved thoughtfully in their handling of these documents. The New York Times sought and received guidance from the Obama administration on especially sensitive materials, and even WikiLeaks redacted thousands of pages that included names of people whose safety might be jeopardized. Those are the actions of responsible journalists.

The WikiLeaks materials have been likened to the Pentagon Papers, an exaggeration but not an entirely inapt comparison. The new documents offer insight primarily into the war-fighting of the recently departed George W. Bush administration; the Pentagon Papers ended with the Johnson administration and were not published until Richard Nixon was president. But much of the WikiLeaks material emanates from the field, so although it makes for gripping reading, it lacks the deep policy implications of the Pentagon Papers.

In 1971, the Supreme Court rebuffed Nixon's attempt to thwart publication of that historic report, and Justice Hugo Black concurred with an opinion that offers timely rebuttal to Lieberman and others who deplore the publication of these latest documents. In crafting the 1st Amendment, Black wrote, the founders understood that security was not best protected by secrecy but by scrutiny.

"The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people," Black wrote. "Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."

The house on Grettisgata Street, in Reykjavik, is a century old, small and white, situated just a few streets from the North Atlantic. The shifting northerly winds can suddenly bring ice and snow to the city, even in springtime, and when they do a certain kind of silence sets in. This was the case on the morning of March 30th, when a tall Australian man named Julian Paul Assange, with gray eyes and a mop of silver-white hair, arrived to rent the place. Assange was dressed in a gray full-body snowsuit, and he had with him a small entourage. “We are journalists,” he told the owner of the house. Eyjafjallajökull had recently begun erupting, and he said, “We’re here to write about the volcano.” After the owner left, Assange quickly closed the drapes, and he made sure that they stayed closed, day and night. The house, as far as he was concerned, would now serve as a war room; people called it the Bunker. Half a dozen computers were set up in a starkly decorated, white-walled living space. Icelandic activists arrived, and they began to work, more or less at Assange’s direction, around the clock. Their focus was Project B—Assange’s code name for a thirty-eight-minute video taken from the cockpit of an Apache military helicopter in Iraq in 2007. The video depicted American soldiers killing at least eighteen people, including two Reuters journalists; it later became the subject of widespread controversy, but at this early stage it was still a closely guarded military secret.

Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin’s private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home. He travels from country to country, staying with supporters, or friends of friends—as he once put it to me, “I’m living in airports these days.” He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say that WikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds of volunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’s complicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, and between three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Key members are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep within WikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chat services. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populist intelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed to publicize information that powerful institutions do not want public, will have serious adversaries.